''A'' for Ascendant

Reviving a rust-ravaged 1957 MGA in the Great White North

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Salt. Sodium chloride. Unless it's sparingly sprinkled over a New York strip (and face it, not even that is any good for you), we all hate it. It's homicide in slow motion for any car with a history behind it. To look at a really bad case of red rot, it's sometimes startling that people will take on a full-scale rescue in the first place. That's sharpened when the car in question isn't somebody's first choice for an over-the-rainbow payoff at one of the big auctions.
Add this in to a big-market Brit that had already had some serious abuse inflicted upon it and someone might beg, why bother to begin with? The answer here aligns with defiant expertise: Gerald Wrohan of Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada, had already limbered up by dealing with rusted General Motors products when he first faced this heavily corroded 1957 MGA 1500; to wit, a 1973 Chevrolet Blazer that he'd purchased new and watched nearly vaporize before his eyes, plus two Pontiac GTOs. He was less frightened off by the reddish devil than most of us.
"What happened was, a friend of mine who's also an MG guy was up on Vancouver Island near Courtenay, and he saw this MGA, along with another one, in a scrap yard. They were both going to be junked, so he got this one, thinking he was going to restore it. That was 12 years before I got it in 1994. Nobody even knew who the previous owner had been. I checked, and there was no registration record. The only clue was a parking sticker for the Canadian Forces base at Comox, which is next to Courtenay, meaning it might have been registered federally, which you can do in Canada if you're in the service. They wouldn't tell me, or couldn't, because the records don't go back more than 25 years."
The MGA was, accurately expressed, a wreck. We'll explain. The most evident problem Gerald first spotted was "a couple of quick CILs previous. It's a Canadian company that does Bondo and paint. You call it a Maaco in the States. The lower fenders in the front were an inch of Bondo over chicken wire, nothing else. The rear quarters had been really badly patched."
The odometer, and the throwaway condition of the MGA, indicates that the MGA's reading of 50,000 plus miles was at least one full lap of the clock. Gerald guesses, and so do we, that it was likely an airman's daily driver until it was left behind. If anything, Canada lays down even more winter salt on its highways than the United States does. Plus, left to the elements of Vancouver Island, the MGA was exposed to the Pacific salt that pervades the air and was mottled with surface rust all over.
No MGA will ever be a top-10 auction sale, most likely. You would be well advised, if you find yourself taking on a project like Gerald's, to honestly assess whether it's really manageable for you. We mean this: "On an MGA, there's a main frame that's extremely strong and then a forward subframe," he recalled. "That subframe was probably three-quarters of an inch out of square, because it had been hit really hard on the left-front corner at some time. There was half an inch of lead on either side of the grille in the front. Somebody had tacked in a piece of tin and just leaded it over. I kid you not. And then also, the hinge pin for the upper A-arm was probably bent back 5 degrees. The whole front end had been pushed over to the right."
To himself, Gerald insisted that all this could be remedied solo. The accident damage indicated a forceful hit, but not full crush trauma as if the MGA had been slammed into a tree or a highway abutment at maximum speed. The fix involved pushing the front end straight in stages, kind of like assembling a pattern for hand-beaten metal, almost done strip by strip in wood, only with no wood in use. First, however, came research, a lot of it, a practice so vital that any would-be restorer who ignores it ought to get his knuckles whacked.
"I was already familiar with getting information and parts on GTOs, so the job was similar with the MGA, just down a different path," Gerald told us. "There are many good books on restoring MGAs, my favorite being Original MGA by [Anders Ditlev] Clausager, which has lots of pictures for reference and great descriptions of all parts of the car. I also used MGA Restoration Guide, by Malcolm Green, which is full of more technical information. Another good source is Clarke Spares and Restorations [of Doylestown, Pennsylvania]. They have a great restoration guide with tons of practical references to help get around the pitfalls of a ground-up restoration."
Up next was the crash repairing. "For the serious work, I used my Makita angle grinder with a fine, four-inch zip-cut blade for the panel removals, plus an air chisel. It required a lot of heat to get rid of the lead in the body, plus hours of hammer and dolly work. I used a MIG welder, my 220-volt Lincoln, to weld patch panels into place using a 'stitch' method where you start in the middle of a long seam and work toward the outside, about an inch at a time, alternating between sides (first left of center, then right of center) so as to not overheat the metal and create distortion. The number of needed patch panels was extensive. On the body tub, both sills had to be replaced. These included the inner panel from the bulkhead behind the seats through to the front inner wheel arches, to which the inner sill is spot welded, and then the outer sill, which is spot welded over the inner sill. When welding on the outer sills, the doors need to be hung in order to check their alignment with the rear fenders."
This is an important point, if you're planning to have an MGA that doesn't look like a mouthful of walnuts once the body's supposedly done. We chatted with David Clark of Sports Car Services in Westminster, Vermont, a guy who's done up a killer MGA or three and really knows the subject matter.
"Our most common first check is to take a screwdriver at floor level and see if you can stick it through the frame. If it doesn't go through, chances are you've got a pretty good frame," David described. "If it does, then you better start checking the frame everywhere else. You should not normally be able to stick a screwdriver through an automobile frame. Structurally, cars that do not have clearly defined front and rear fenders, and rocker panels, have plastic in them. You have to determine how much. The completeness isn't a big problem anymore, because you can buy the pieces, but the quality varies widely depending on the component."
Gerald suggested another difficult body-restoration lesson: "The rear fender seats against the sill behind the door, so if the sill is too narrow, the door will stick out at the bottom edge. I know this because I didn't check carefully enough, and my passenger door looks as though it is not closed tight. I have noticed this problem with a number of home restorations. Todd Clarke's restoration guide explains this in detail, but I still got it a little wrong. You should use the frame as a jig for aligning the body, and remove the body from the frame after it's done to make it easier to do the mechanical work.
"The leading edge of both rear fenders had to be fixed. The rear fenders had been badly abused, with many tears and dents. All the thin spots had to be reinforced and then the fenders had to be mounted to the body, so that relief cuts could be made and re-welded to get the fenders to fit. I had other fun trying to heat-shrink the aluminum hood where a couple of deep dents had stretched the metal. The front and rear valances had both been badly damaged over the years, so both need major tin bashing, straightening, welding and fitting. I tried, unsuccessfully, to weld a new bottom in the fuel tank, and had to buy a used one from Octagon. I also got a front fender from Octagon. I was fortunate to have them as a dealer for Moss Motors and many other British suppliers."
Being flung wantonly to the elements assured that this project was going to be a trudging slog against one bodywork woe after another. The drivetrain, though mostly separated from the car when Gerald stepped in (it appears that somebody, long ago, had a least made a feint toward starting a restoration, but soon retreated), proved far easier to manage. "Basically, when we got the engine going, it needed to be bored a little, so we went up to the 1,622cc, which is the natural progression for that engine," Gerald said, explaining that Strebor Engineering in Victoria, British Columbia, did the machine work. "They used that same block for everything up to the 1800. We overbored it, but are still using the stock crankshaft and connecting rods." Strebor also handled the transmission rebuild.
Dare we say it, finishing the repaired and separated frame and body (with new plywood floorboards) was likewise straightforward. Gerald had chemically stripped the MGA body, used Body Gold filler and cannot remember how many hours he spent block-sanding it before beginning the paintwork. That finally began with "lots" of DP epoxy primer, sanded with 220-grade paper. Using factory color from the rear of the dashboard as a guide, he applied a Glacier Blue hue using four coats of PPG Concept urethane, shot using his own DeVilbiss HVLP gun and sanded with 600- to 1,200-grade paper.
The metaphor about a creature from another era being shocked back to life may be shopworn, but it really does apply here. Instead of rotting, Gerald's MGA is now running and backed by some strong numbers: a recent 5,000-mile trip to Mackinac Island, Michigan, and an estimated total restoration cost of $18,000 over nine years, much of it for reproduction parts and patches.
"It was fun to drive and, overall, fairly simple to rebuild," he said. "It's proven to be quite reliable, in a British kind of way."

This article originally appeared in the November, 2011 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.